The Charge of the 402nd
by 782
Summary: Imperial Guardsmen in the 402nd Rakarshan Rifles Regiment fight a desperate war against the tau in the opening stages of the Damocles Gulf Crusade. Inspired by Lord Tennyson's excellent poem 'The Charge of the Light Brigade'.


**Author's Notes (A/N):** This oneshot does _not_ mean that I've abandoned either of my other stories; I haven't, though I'm afraid I'm not always very fast at updating.

This is inspired by Lord Tennyson's excellent poem, _The Charge of the Light Brigade_.

**Disclaimer:** The _Warhammer 40,000_ tabletop game, setting and all associated products are the property of Games Workshop. This story of mine is non-commercial. It is protected under the "Fair Use" section of copyright law.

* * *

The Charge of the 402nd

The glittering ranks of the Imperial Guard: twenty-thousand lasguns gleaming and presented to the enemy, twenty-thousand men in light flak armour vulnerable to the guns of the tau, twenty-thousand machetes for clearing trees that would never need to be cleared, because there _were _no trees: nothing but the artillery of the Fire Caste.

Once, Sector Eighteen had been a picturesque, snowy mountain valley covered with coniferous trees, like all the other valleys next to it. Now, ever since the birth of the city of Tegula, the trees had been slashed and burnt away by colonists from the Imperium of Man, and in their place there stood a wide, flat road of beige-grey rockcrete, completely covered, in this winter, by a layer of snow.

A killing field.

"On my order!" roared the Colonel of the 402nd Rakarshan Rifles Regiment, clad in a simple Guardsman's uniform but with a bolter at his side. "_Charge_!"

The battle-cry ripped itself desperately from twenty-thousand mouths: "_FOR THE EMPEROR_!"

* * *

Sector Eighteen: nine miles of open road, studded with guns and positively _crawling_ with xenos. It was described by General Nullovirtus's staff as a 'concentration of enemy forces in a heavily fortified location'. The Guardsmen of the 688th Field Army had a simpler name for it: 'Death Valley'.

"_Eighteen_?" Major Retriloc, the Colonel's chief of staff, exclaimed. "Throne of Terra, _surely_ you jest—"

"I do _not_ jest about things like this," the Colonel snapped, pacing. "This _must_ be a mistake. Sector Eighteen is a place for a _tank corps_, not a light infantry regiment like us. In a forest valley we can manage and, I daresay, even excel; advancing over open ground against enemy artillery, we shall just get shot to pieces."

"I hope," came the only voice in the room without a Rakarshan accent, "that you do not intend to disobey your superiors' orders, Colonel Vitupri. Rightful Imperial orders are His Divine Majesty's will; they _must_ be followed to the letter."

"This is not a matter of disobedience, Commissar," Vitupri argued, "it is a matter of what my superiors intended. Nullovirtus _cannot_ have meant _this_; there must have been an error in transmission. If we enter Sector Eighteen, we shall all be killed."

"Our lives belong to the Master of Mankind," said the political officer pitilessly, "and as the God-Emperor giveth, the God-Emperor taketh away. That is the duty of the Imperial Guard: we die standing. Will you stand, Colonel, or will you be a coward?"

"Of _course_ I stand! I stand for the interests of the Emperor!" The Colonel tried to control his voice and his rising temper. "How does it serve His Divine Majesty if we die for no reason in Sector Eighteen, when we could instead play a useful role in recapturing a city from His enemies, just by asking the General to clarify this?"

"It is not our place to choose how we serve the Emperor," the commissar snapped in response. "Do you not remember the Imperial Creed? 'Obedience is virtue'," he quoted. "'Blessed is the mind too small for doubt.'"

"Commissar, this _is_ obedience," Vitupri said. "All that I ask is to contact General Nullovirtus and inform him of the situation; surely, to do anything else would be to help the xenos, not the Emperor."

"Are you accusing me of helping xenos?" roared the commissar.

"_What_? No—"

A darting hand, a gleam of steel: the commissar had drawn his boltpistol and pointed it at the Colonel. "_Heresy_!" Vitupri stood still, frozen in shock…

…and a laser-beam drilled through the commissar's head.

Naryl Retriloc lowered his las-rifle, its smoking muzzle pointing at the commissar's corpse collapsing onto the floor.

"Naryl… we shall both burn for this…" Vitupri whispered, shocked and appalled. "Killing a political officer…"

"But the men will not," said grim-faced Major Retriloc. "Make the call."

"I am," the Colonel said. His fingers shaking, Vitupri pressed the requisite buttons to call the 688th Field Army's General.

* * *

The screams began: the dreadful, eerie sounds filling the wintry air. Blood and fire rained from the sky, the tau artillery reigning like angry gods over the battlefield. Giant railgun shells, vicious ion bursts and automatic plasma pulse-fire shredded human flesh like paper. The valley's snow, a perfect white on the rest of this southern hemisphere of Balaclaris Prime, turned red with Imperial blood…

…and still the 402nd charged on.

"What can they hope to accomplish?" whispered Shas'El Ma'In'Tvu, the commanding officer of the tau guns in this valley. "These gue'la are _insane_…"

"_FOR THE EMPEROR_!" came that accursed cry, and thousands upon thousands of Rakarshan soldiers threw themselves at Ma'In'Tvu's artillery, firing relentlessly, even though they must have known they stood no chance. The tau guns spoke in turn; railguns, pulse guns and ion cannons unleashed their fury, fire and steel raining from the heavens down upon the humans…

…and still the 402nd charged on.

Malkom Vitupri's bolter bucked wildly as he advanced, its recoil hitting him again and again as he fired uselessly at the tau guns, still so very far away. The Colonel knew that he was going to die; the xenos' guns made that quite plain, since he could see the blood and guts of his men dying all around him. So, too, could every man in the Rakarshan 402nd see the shattered, ruined corpses, ripped apart by tau guns they should never have been facing, broken bodies of their comrades spattering them with gore.

To bolster his own courage, he thought not of this campaign's current catastrophe, but rather of its glorious beginnings:

* * *

For the three years since its planetary governor's defection, Balaclaris Prime had lain under the rule of the Tau Empire. But even the most pessimistic Imperial officers knew that that was about to change.

The Damocles Gulf Crusade had come like an avalanche: fast, ferocious and utterly unexpected. The space battle had been pitifully short, the tau warships and planetary defences smashed aside by the superior firepower of three Imperial grand cruisers. Then Lord General Opteus had sent down his troopships, each of them carrying a grand group of several million Imperial Guardsmen, ready to exterminate the xenos who had dared to trespass on the territory of His Divine Majesty.

One of those troopships had carried the great Grand Marshal Augustus Calimone, an officer almost as renowned as Opteus himself. Calimone had been assigned to conquer the Liraga subcontinent, and he had taken to the task with gusto.

Grand Group Liraga, as Calimone's forces became known, had come off to an astounding start. The Fifth and Sixth Companies of the Scythes of the Emperor Space Marines had used their drop pods to launch a surprise attack on the Liragan capital city of 'Liragulis', killing the tau governors and sowing discord among the xeno Fire Warriors there. Then eighteen Guard regiments of tanks and seventy-four of infantry had bulldozed into Liragulis, supported by Imperial Naval aircraft, Kriegan artillery, and even a _Reaver_-class battle titan from the Legio Thanataris.

The 402nd had been one of those infantry regiments. They'd fought hard, and with their help the armed forces of the Imperium had massacred every xeno in that city in three days of glorious fighting.

It had been the 402nd's finest hour.

But that was when Grand Marshal Calimone had been personally in charge; and there were too many cities in Liraga for him to be there at every siege. The assault on Tegula, a minor city with only four-million inhabitants, had been delegated to a certain General Ignavus Nullovirtus—and that was why the 402nd was going to die.

* * *

"Well, Colonel?" said Nullovirtus, his annoyance coming loud and clear across the phone. "Why are you wasting my time just before a major offensive?"

"There—there's been something of a blunder, sir," Vitupri said. "It's an extra I in the numeral from a careless servitor, sir; we were meant for Sector Seventeen, and the message mistakenly says Eighteen."

"Who told you you're meant for Seventeen?" the General demanded.

Vitupri's heart sank. "Just… sir… it is simply that Sector Seventeen is a forest, ideal for light infantry such as ourselves, sir…"

"So you're questioning a direct order, out of your _personal opinion_? I have no time for fools like you, Colonel Vitupri. Now you will _obey_, or you're a coward and a traitor to the God-Emperor. Are you a coward?"

Vitupri was pale, trembling with revulsion and disgust. "But sir—"

"Are you a traitor, then?"

Vitupri swallowed his pride and his hope. "I obey, sir."

"See that you do," the General said, "and if I hear nothing more of this then you won't be burnt at the stake for cowardice in the face of the enemy."

"Yes, sir."

Ignavus Nullovirtus dropped the phone and lazed back on his luxurious chair. "Wine," he said absent-mindedly to one of his servants, who rushed to obey. From the comfort and safety of his command base several hundred miles behind the front lines, Nullovirtus was pleased at how the Battle of Tegula was going. The 688th Field Army was well-prepared and held enough of an advantage in numbers to roll over the tau fortifications quickly, even though he'd personally requested to assail Tegula, the best-defended of the minor cities in the Liraga subcontinent.

He hoped Grand Marshal Calimone would notice.

At the start of this campaign, Calimone had summoned all the Generals and even Field Marshals in Grand Group Liraga to his Capitol Imperialis mobile command base, telling them he was a hard man to impress but he could still be impressed by a swift, decisive victory against a powerful foe.

Nullovirtus would deliver his Grand Marshal that victory—and if he had to sacrifice a few dozen thousands of Guardsmen to get it, so be it.

* * *

"All for nothing," Vitupri said in disgust as he threw the phone violently aside. "The General insists it was a direct order, so we have to obey."

"Surely we have options?" Retriloc begged. "We could appeal further up the chain of command—"

"You think a Field Marshal would micromanage affairs at the regimental level? I doubt it. No, Naryl, it seems that this is what we are assigned to, and by the Master of Mankind if that is our duty… that, then, is our duty."

* * *

The star Balaclaris shone brightly over Sector Eighteen, blue light reflecting endlessly off the snow and giving an ethereal cast to all the evergreen trees.

It was a pretty place to die.

The battle was reaching its conclusion. Light and fire flashed from places in the mountains at either side of the valley, where the cunning xenos of the Fire Caste had hidden some of their artillery. But most of the tau guns were entrenched just half a mile ahead, on the side of the road—and twenty-thousand men took quite a lot of time to die.

Not that there were twenty-thousand now. The Colonel was dead; in his place Lieutenants, Captains and Majors led small bands of survivors to charge ever-further into the tau field of fire. The xeno shells became more frequent as the Imperial Guardsmen approached; perhaps the tau were realising how little mercy they'd shown to the 402nd, and how little they'd get in return.

Tau ion cannons, pulse guns and railguns spoke virtually every second as the human forces came closer, but they couldn't completely crush the fanatical warriors of the God-Emperor. For a few more nightmarish minutes the tau artillery fire became insanely concentrated, seeking to destroy the 402nd…

…and then, finally, the 402nd entered the trenches.

The human wave broke on the tau shore. Every soldier of the 402nd bellowed wild, brutal war-cries as they leapt agilely into the trenches with the benefit of all their training as light infantrymen, an angry horde assailing the terrified tau. With brutal volleys of las-fire they mowed down all the cowering xenos present, who were defenceless against the Rakarshans' fury.

They relished the massacre. What sweeter thing existed in the universe than vengeance?

* * *

"Throne on Terra," murmured the Imperial Naval pilot Alexei Tygany as his Marauder Vigilant reconnaissance aircraft hovered over Sector Eighteen. There was a trail of blood and corpses from the start of the Rakarshan charge to the tau artillery emplacements, thousands and thousands of broken bodies lying on the road as the regiment reached forward to the guns. As the trail approached the guns themselves the cadavers became more numerous, more concentrated; the men had been dying faster. The once-white snow had turned so red that the road now resembled a fire winding through the Balaclarian forest, and in a sense it was: a fire when compassion was sacrificed by both sides, on the altar of war.

The tau must have retreated. The average Guard infantry regiment had twenty-thousand men; judging by his Vigilant's cogitators, that looked like about twenty-thousand men, just there. _What a waste_, Tygany thought. _What a frakking waste of all those guys._

Then he espied movement. Incredulously, he made his Vigilant's cameras go back to the trenches and zoom in. An exhausted man in a tattered Captain's uniform was climbing out of the deep trenches, followed by a few hundred straggling, lower-ranking survivors.

Left from twenty-thousand.

"You poor bastards," Tygany breathed. He landed quickly—the Marauder Vigilant was perfectly capable of VTOL—and strode out of his aeroplane, amazed and overawed by these men.

"Why didn't you run?" he asked them. "There were mountains, there was cover everywhere if you left that road. Why didn't you run?"

The Rakarshan Captain's voice was parched from lack of water, and he was covered with wounds. Yet injured and blood-covered as he was, his dedication was still clearly audible as he rasped:

"For the Emperor."


End file.
